270
people died when Pan Am 103 was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland
on December 21, 1988. It was the worst-ever act of airline terrorism against the
United States. It's also been called the world's biggest unsolved murder.

Finally, after 11 years
of investigation, political stalemate, and legal delays, two Libyan men prepare
to face trial for the Lockerbie bombing starting May 3, 2000, in the Netherlands.

But many observers -
including legal and law enforcement officials close to the case - say the trial
may not produce a satisfying answer to the question of who bombed Pan Am 103.

In this special report,
journalists Ian Ferguson and John Biewen of American RadioWorks explore the case
against the Libyans - its strengths and weaknesses.

They also examine the
evidence against other suspects, most notably the Iranian government and a terrorist
group based in Syria. Some experts, and people who lost loves ones on Pan Am 103,
question whether the most likely culprits are going on trial.

Pan Am 103 climbed into
the dark English sky at 6:25 in the evening on December 21, 1988. It headed northwest
from London's Heathrow Airport toward Scotland and the North Sea and, ultimately,
scheduled destinations in New York and Detroit. The Jumbo Jet carried 259 passengers
and crew. The majority were Americans, many of them returning for holiday gatherings
with family and friends. But just 38 minutes into the flight, as the 747 cruised
at 31,000 feet over the border from England into Scotland, something in the cargo
hold exploded. It blew a hole the size of a large dinner plate in the airliner's
skin. The loss of air pressure caused a powerful rush that broke the plane to
pieces. Six miles below, in the Scottish border town of Lockerbie, a woman looked
up at the sky.

"There was this absolutely
massive sort of red glow in the sky that went firstly upwards and then out,"
the woman told a TV interviewer later that night. "We thought it was some
sort of, like, nuclear explosion."

But then things began to
fall like violent rain from some nightmare: airplane parts, suitcases and their
contents, packages gift-wrapped for the holidays. Tons and tons of aviation fuel.
And people.

In one Lockerbie neighborhood,
a 60-foot section of fuselage, with 60 bodies inside, landed between two rows
of houses, miraculously missing them all. Across town a jet engine the size of
a small truck landed like a small meteor in the parking lot of an apartment building,
leaving a crater but injuring no one. Bodies rained on a golf course. Amid the
near-misses, one tragic strike: a wing of the 747 fell directly on three houses,
creating a fireball that burned so hot it vaporized the homes and the eleven people
inside them.

Families

270 dead, and at least
that many families devastated by the loss of loved ones. 189 of the victims were
Americans - more than died later in the 1994 Oklahoma City bombing.

"You are, you know,
permanently changed in some ways," says Paul Hudson, a New York lawyer whose
16-year-old daughter, Melina, died on Pan Am 103. Melina was a high-school exchange
student on her way home from Exeter. For her father, as for many other victims
of the Pan Am bombing, Lockerbie became an obsession. Paul Hudson now runs the
Aviation Consumer Action Project, a non-profit group devoted to improving airline
safety and security.

Across the Atlantic, in
the English Midlands, parents of another young victim were equally devastated.
Flora Swire was a gifted and vivacious 23-year-old medical student flying to New
York to visit her American boyfriend when she died on Pan Am 103. "We would
like to know before we die the background and the reason and who did this terrible
crime," says Flora's mother, Jane Swire.

Mrs. Swire is a soft-spoken
woman who gives few interviews, but her husband Jim has waged an 11-year public
campaign to keep Lockerbie in the public eye and bring the bombers to justice.
Swire recently left his medical practice in order to attend the trial in the Netherlands
full-time.

"It's like, for us,
any other murder would be," he says. "Somebody has murdered our daughter.
Brutally, premeditated murder, a horrible death. Can you imagine being hurled
into the sub-zero, dark skies over Lockerbie, with a gale raging ...? Someone
should be brought to justice for that."

At Last, a Trial

Many families of Pan Am
103 victims hope justice is finally coming. The trial of two alleged members of
the Libyan Intelligence Service is scheduled to start in May, 2000. The defendants,
Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, are in custody at a former US
air base in the Netherlands. The unusual plan to hold the trial in a neutral country
was agreed to last year by Scotland, the US, and Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi.
The trial will be held in Holland but under Scottish law before a panel of three
Scottish judges. The defendants insist they're innocent.

The investigation that
produced the charges against the Libyans was a joint effort by British and American
authorities. Current government officials in the two countries won't discuss Lockerbie;
British law forbids public discussion of a pending criminal case, and the US Justice
Department says the indictment of the two Libyans speaks for itself. Several former
investigators who worked on the case say the evidence against the Libyans is solid.

"I believe it is an
absolutely airtight case," says former FBI Assistant Director Oliver "Buck"
Revell, who oversaw that agency's Lockerbie investigation until 1991. "The
panel of judges will clearly see that the evidence is compelling and overwhelming
and could only lead to one conclusion."

The conclusion, according
to the indictment: that on the morning of December 21, 1988, the two Libyans entered
Luqa airport on the Mediterranean island of Malta. They placed a brown Samsonite
suitcase, with a bomb hidden inside, on an Air Malta jet bound for Frankfurt.
That suitcase was then transferred to Pan Am flights in Frankfurt and London before
blowing up over Lockerbie. Libyan leader Qadhafi is not named in the indictment,
but former investigators say they believe he personally ordered the bombing of
Pan Am 103.

"There's a lot of
evidence, as well as intelligence ... which indicates that the regime was involved,"
says David Shayler, who headed the Libya Desk for Britain's intelligence service,
MI5, in the mid-1990s. Qadhafi's motive, according to Shayler: revenge. In April,
1986, two-and-a-half years before the downing of Pan Am 103, US warplanes bombed
Libya's two largest cities, Tripoli and Benghazi, to punish Qadhafi for alleged
terrorist attacks in Europe. An estimated 100 Libyans died in the attack, including
Qadhafi's 2-year-old adopted daughter.

The Skeptics

Among law enforcement and
legal experts who've looked closely at the Lockerbie case, there's an array of
skeptics who question that the Libyans are the real culprits, or the most important
ones. Those skeptics include several of the United Kingdom's top legal experts,
and the Maltese and German governments. Malta and Germany are the other two countries
where the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103 allegedly traveled before blowing up
over Britain. Neither government subscribes to the charge against the Libyans.

Another prominent skeptic
is Noel Koch, who headed anti-terrorism efforts for the US Defense Department
from 1981 to 1986 and still works on contract for the US State Department as an
anti-terrorism expert. "It was decided by the two governments, by the United
States and the United Kingdom, that Libya had been responsible for the bombing
of Pan Am 103," Koch says. "I have never believed that, and I don't
believe the case will stand against the Libyans."

The real bombers, in Koch's
view? "My own conviction from the outset was that the Syrians and Iranians
were pre-eminently responsible for this."

Back in the early years
of the Lockerbie case, British and American investigators seemed to share that
conviction. In 1989 and 1990, Lockerbie investigators were talking with near-certainty,
not about a Libyan plot, but one by another set of suspects: the Iranian government
headed by Ayatollah Khomeini, and a Syria-based terrorist organization headed
by a notorious terrorist named Ahmed Jibril.

The Early Suspects: Iran and Syrian
Terrorists

Because Pan Am 103 blew
up over British soil, and the jet and most of its passengers were American, the
United Kingdom and United States teamed up to lead the enormous international
investigation - arguably the largest criminal investigation in history. Those
on the ground in Scotland faced a huge and painstaking job: gathering and sorting
tons of potential evidence scattered by the explosion and the wind across more
than 800 square miles of countryside.

While Scottish police launched
into that task, early suspicion focused on one radically anti-American government:
Iran. Officials thought it likely that the government of Ayatollah Khomeini had
sponsored the bombing, and that Ahmed Jibril and his Syria-based terrorist organization,
the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC),
had carried it out.

The evidence for that scenario
did seem compelling, starting with a fresh motive, and a direct threat less than
six months before the destruction of Pan Am 103. During a tense skirmish with
Iranian gunboats in the Persian Gulf, the navy cruiser USS Vincennes shot down
an Iranian passenger jet, which was carrying pilgrims to Mecca. 290 Iranians died.
The US military insisted the shoot-down was a tragic mistake. But Iran's Islamic
fundamentalist leaders promised to "retaliate to the maximum," and to
"avenge the blood of our martyrs."

And the Ayatollah's government
meant it, according to former intelligence officials. Top figures in the Iranian
government held a series of meetings in Beirut with leaders of Ahmed Jibril's
terror group, the PFLP-GC, says Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's chief of counter-terrorism
at the time. "There was a conclusion made in the intelligence community that
the Iranians were intending to sponsor the PFLP-GC's operations to attack American
targets as part of a revenge operation," Cannistraro says.

Following its meetings
with Iranian officials, Cannistraro says, the PFLP-GC set up a bomb-making operation
centered in the West German town of Neuss. But the West German government was
watching. In October, 1988, two months before Pan Am 103 exploded, the German
federal police launched what they called Operation Autumn Leaves: they raided
more than a dozen homes and businesses, rounding up seventeen men, including several
high-ranking associates of PFLP-GC leader Ahmed Jibril.

They also found Semtex
plastic explosive and a barometric detonator designed to go off at high altitude
ó an airplane bomb. It was packed in a Toshiba cassette recorder called
a Bombeat. The man who allegedly built the bomb had been surveilled carrying a
brown Samsonite suitcase, according to West German police documents. Police jailed
two leaders of the bomb-making group, but a judge ordered the rest released. Still,
the West Germans boasted they'd successfully broken up a terrorist plot. Until
two months later, when Pan Am 103 blew up over Lockerbie.

Forensic investigators
in Lockerbie determined that the bomb had been hidden in a cassette player and
suitcase similar to those seized from the PFLP-GC in Germany: a Toshiba Bombeat
and a brown Samsonite. The focus on the PFLP-GC intensified a couple of months
later. The man who admitted building bombs for the group, Marwan Khreesat, turned
up in Amman, Jordan. Khreesat told authorities that while in Germany he'd built
five bombs, not just the one the police had seized.

In the spring of 1989,
West German police went back to Neuss to search for the four remaining bombs.
At the apartment of the fruit merchant they found three. And the bombs were wired
and ready: one blew up and killed a police technician. Still, one bomb went unaccounted
for.

Cannistraro, then head
of the CIA's Lockerbie investigation, says authorities focused on the likelihood
that Marwan Khreesat's fifth bomb had blown up the Pan Am 747 over Lockerbie.
"The immediate feeling was: we've missed someone. That someone in that [PFLP-GC]
cell had escaped with one of the explosive devices and succeeded in planting it
on Pan Am 103."

The Investigation Turns

Given the early consensus
that the Jibril group and the Iranian government had conspired to blow up Pan
Am 103, many experts and relatives of Pan Am 103 victims were stunned when British
and American officials finally announced an indictment in the fall of 1991. The
joint indictment by Scottish and American authorities named only the two Libyans,
Megrahi and Fhimah. Officials of the two governments said that while the evidence
against Iran and the Jibril group had seemed powerful at first, it simply did
not stand up. According to a US State Department fact sheet explaining the turn
in the investigation:

It was discovered
in June 1990 that the Pan Am 103 bomb had been activated by a sophisticated electronic
timer, in contrast to the PFLP-GC bombs, which had altimeter switches and relatively
crude timers.

The State Department also
said that, on closer inspection, the Toshiba Bombeat cassette player that housed
the Lockerbie bomb differed from the Toshiba Bombeat used by the PFLP-GC; one
had stereo speakers, the other mono.

Some relatives of victims
said those seemed like flimsy reasons to absolve Iran and Syria. Notably, the
skeptics also included the man once in charge of the CIA's Lockerbie investigation,
Vincent Cannistraro, who retired in late 1990, a year before the indictments.

"The US Justice Department
... contends that these were two separate independent operations both targeted
against an American airliner but independent of each other and not known to each
other - two separate tracks if you will," Cannistraro says. "That's
always seemed a bit difficult to accept, that two major terrorist groups were
targeting the same airliner out of the same location, Frankfurt, Germany, at the
same time."

And that both hid their
bombs in Toshiba Bombeat cassette players and placed them in brown Samsonite suitcases.

Nonetheless, Cannistraro
says he is persuaded that the Libyans are guilty. He says Qadhafi's government
was in touch with the PFLP-GC and had, in fact, subsidized the group. But Cannistraro
says he's convinced Qadhafi's men were hired to finish the Pan Am bombing only
after the West German police broke up the PFLP-GC's operation. "I do think
the Libyans carried it out. But I believe more it was a hand-off from the PFLP-GC
after their own operational cell was compromised."

So, who conspired to bomb
Pan Am 103? Iran, Syria, the PFLP-GC, or the Libyans? Cannistraro's answer is:
maybe all of the above. But the Lockerbie indictment of 1991 pointed the finger
only at the Libyans. In a comment shortly after the indictment, President Bush
explicitly exonerated Damascus. "The Syrians took a bum rap on this,"
Bush said.

US and British officials
said that new evidence turned investigators away from Iran and Syria and toward
Libya. In the years since the indictment, several news organizations and legal
experts have suggested the evidence against the Libyans appears strikingly weak.
Others advise caution about drawing such conclusions prior to trial. "We
haven't yet heard one word of testimony, and it's always very easy to debunk evidence
in advance of a trial," says John Grant, until recently a dean at Glasgow
University Law School.

That said, a close look
at the evidence that investigators have touted over the years suggests
the prosecution case may be flawed.

The Timer

In announcing the indictment
of the Libyans in 1991, officials said they began looking at Libya in earnest
after the discovery of a tiny fragment of plastic circuit board. They said it
was found in the Kielder forest east of Lockerbie. The fragment, no bigger than
a child's fingernail, was part of the timing device that triggered the bomb, forensic
experts concluded. And eventually, investigators said, the timer led straight
to the Libyan government.

Among the mysteries surrounding
the fragment is how, when, and by whom it was found. "A lover and his lass"
found the fragment while strolling in the forest, according to one police source
close to the case. A man found the fragment while walking his dog, according to
another version. Or, in yet another story from a former investigator, police found
it while combing the ground on their hands and knees.

In any case, an FBI forensic
specialist named Tom Thurman was publicly credited with figuring out the fragment's
evidentiary importance. Thurman, who then worked in the FBI's Washington DC laboratory,
told ABC News in 1991 that he'd matched the Lockerbie timer fragment with one
confiscated in West Africa from Libyan agents. "When that identification
was made, of the timer, I knew that we had it," Thurman told ABC in 1991.
Thurman's feelings about his discovery? "Absolute, positively euphoria. I
was on cloud nine."

But Thurman was later discredited
as a forensic expert. A 1997 report by the Justice Department's Office of the
Inspector General found that in a number of cases other than Lockerbie, Thurman
re-wrote lab reports, making them more favorable to the prosecution. The report
also recommended Thurman be reassigned to a non-scientific job because he lacked
a background in science.

"He's very aggressive,
but I think he made some mistakes that needed to be brought to the attention of
FBI management," says Frederic Whitehurst, a former FBI chemist who worked
alongside Thurman for 12 years and filed the complaints that led to the Inspector
General's report. Based on his observations of work done by Thurman and others
in the FBI lab, Whitehurst says he concluded that "We're not necessarily
going to get the truth out of what we're doing here."

Tom Thurman is out of the
FBI now; he's teaching in Kentucky. He says Scottish prosecutors and the Justice
Department have asked him not to do interviews.

Thurman is just one of
the problems prosecutors will face in presenting the timer fragment. Another is
the man who allegedly made and sold the timer. At the press conference announcing
the indictment in 1991, then-Acting Attorney General William Barr said of the
fragment: "Scientists determined that it was part of the timing device and
traced it to its manufacturer, a Swiss company that had sold it to a high-level
Libyan intelligence official."

Behind the scenes though,
Edwin Bollier, a partner in the Zurich-based electronics company, MEBO, was telling
a different story. In 1990 police had shown him a photograph of the circuit-board
fragment. He agreed that it had come from a circuit board made by his company
- a model MST-13. At first Bollier told investigators he'd sold MST-13 timers
only to the Libyan government.

The Swiss businessman,
however, soon changed his story. He said an employee had reminded him that he'd
sold several prototypes of the MST-13 to an institute in Bernau. This institute
acted as a front for the former East German secret police, the Stasi. The Stasi
were known suppliers and supporters of terrorist groups, including Ahmed Jibril's
PFLP-GC, the Syria-based group first suspected in Lockerbie.

Early in 1991, months before
the Lockerbie indictments, Bollier told Scottish investigators that from a photograph
alone he couldn't tell from which batch the timer fragment had come. He made repeated
requests to examine the fragment itself, in person. Scottish authorities said
no, citing "the need to protect the integrity of the evidence," as police
put it in a letter to Bollier. In November, 1991, Scottish and American officials
indicted the Libyans, citing the timer fragment as a key piece of evidence, without
ever having allowed Bollier to examine the fragment up close.

Bollier says he now knows
why: his conclusion, he claims, would not have suited the case the British and
American governments were building.

In 1998 Bollier obtained
what he says is a blown-up photograph of the printed circuit (PC) board fragment
that Thurman showed ABC in 1991. Bollier describes the fragment's unfinished edge
and a white line with wavy edges that he says proves it was made by hand and a
not a machine. "This fragment of PC board is from a prototype timer,"
Bollier says. "It was made by Mr. Lumpert, an engineer here in our labs.
Two of these PC boards eventually became complete timers, and these two I took
to what at the time was East Germany."

In other words, Bollier
insists, Thurman's fragment perhaps should have strengthened the case against
the Syria-based terrorists, the PFLP-GC. It should never have pointed investigators
toward Libya at all.

Former CIA official Cannistraro
concedes that Bollier sold MST-13 prototypes to the Stasi. He simply dismisses
Bollier's claim that the timer that triggered the Pan Am 103 bomb was part of
that batch. Don't trust Bollier, Cannistraro says. The Swiss merchant not only
had business with the Libyan government, he once rented office space in Zurich
to one of the Pan Am 103 defendants, Abdelbaset Megrahi, an alleged Libyan intelligence
agent. "Given the fact that [Bollier] has an investment with the Libyans,
he's been a supplier of devices that are only used for lethal purposes, and the
fact that he has provided cover facilities for Libyan intelligence, I don't know
how much you can believe Mr. Bollier," Cannistraro says.

The hostile relationship
between Bollier and Lockerbie investigators took a bizarre turn in September of
1999. With a trial finally approaching, the Scottish prosecutors who had refused
for eight years to show Bollier the circuit board fragment suddenly invited him
to Scotland. As Bollier tells it, a prosecutor, surrounded by four policemen,
brought in the fragment in an unmarked plastic sleeve and placed it before him
on a table. He says he'd brought his own magnifying glass. "I was surprised
at how small it was...."

Bollier says the fragment,
just two millimeters by three in size, was different from the one the FBI displayed
on television back in 1991. This one, he claims, was machine-made, like the ones
he sold to the Libyan government, but now had a new problem: it didn't show traces
of solder, which Bollier says should have been present if an electrical relay
had ever been attached to the circuit board. In other words, he says, the fragment
could never have been used in a bomb.

"As far as I'm concerned,
and I told this to [Scottish Prosecutor Miriam Watson], this is a manufactured
fragment," Bollier says. "A fabricated fragment, never from a complete,
functional timer." Bollier insisted on making a written statement to that
effect; the statement was signed by Scottish police witnesses.

The next day, Bollier says,
prosecutors brought out the fragment again. This time, he says, it had
the soldering traces you'd expect on a used timer. Bollier switches to English
to drive home his point, that the soldering points had apparently been added overnight.
"It was different. I'm not crazy. It was different!"

Bollier demanded to make
another written statement saying that the timer fragment had been tampered with
during his visit to Scotland.

At the Lockerbie trial
the Scottish judges will have to sort out the charges and counter-charges with
the help of forensic scientists.

Former Lockerbie investigators
insist that at trial, the evidence will show the Libyan government bought the
timer that blew up Pan Am 103. But sources close to the Libyans' lawyers say the
defense team isn't worried about the timer. Even if the Libyan government did
buy the timer in 1985, the defense will argue, that does not directly link the
two Libyan defendants to the bomb that destroyed the Pan Am jet three years later.

Independent legal experts
agree. To get a conviction, they say, Scottish authorities must prove something
much more specific: that the defendants themselves, Megrahi and Fhimah, planted
the bomb that killed those 270 people. The indictment suggests that most of the
evidence for that charge is in Malta.

The Malta Connection

The tiny island of Malta
sits in the southern Mediterranean, south of Sicily and less than 200 miles off
the coast of Libya. In 1988, both of the Libyan defendants lived and worked on
the island as managers for Libyan Arab Airlines. To convict the pair, prosecutors
must show that the bomb that blew up Pan Am 103 started its deadly journey in
Malta, and that Megrahi and Fhimah themselves conspired to build or acquire the
bomb and place it on Air Malta Flight 180 on the morning of December 21, 1988.

Air Malta Flight 180

At the time of the Pan
Am 103 bombing, Abdelbaset Megrahi was Station Manager for Libya Arab Airlines
at Malta's Luqa airport. The other defendant, Fhimah, had been head of security
for the Libyan airline until September of 1988, when he left his airport job to
begin launching a travel-related business of his own. The conspiracy charge against
the pair says all of their jobs were covers for their real work with the JSO,
the Libyan Intelligence Service.

The indictment says that
on the morning of the 21 December, 1988, the two men placed aboard Air Malta Flight
180, from Malta to Frankfurt, a brown Samsonite suitcase containing the bomb that
ultimately blew up Pan Am 103. The prosecution will argue that the deadly suitcase
was then transferred as unaccompanied baggage, first to Pan Am Flight 103A at
Frankfurt, then to Flight 103 at London, before blowing up over Lockerbie.

Some terrorism experts
argue that that scenario is implausible on its face. One such skeptic is Noel
Koch, who headed the US Defense Department's anti-terrorism efforts from 1981
to 1986. Sophisticated Middle East terrorists who wanted to blow up a plane over
the North Atlantic, Koch insists, would not plant their bomb nearly a thousand
miles away and rely on two successful luggage transfers by airline workers.

"I can tell you this
much that I know about terrorism: it's simple," Koch says. "You don't
complicate life. Life's complicated enough as it is. If you've got a target you
want to get as close as you can to it and you don't go through a series of permutations
that provide opportunities for failure, that provide opportunities for discovery.
It doesn't work that way."

A former British Intelligence
official disagrees. "You could say there is good reason for putting up a
bomb suitcase on three planes, because it makes it that much more difficult to
trace," says David Shayler, who headed the Libya Desk for MI5 in the mid-1990s.

The challenge for the prosecution
will be to demonstrate that Megrahi and Fhimah actually placed that bomb. But
first, the Scottish prosecutors must show solid evidence for the Malta Connection
itself - that there was in fact a bomb-laden suitcase aboard Air Malta 180 on
the morning that Pan Am 103 exploded. If lawyers for the Crown can't prove that
beyond reasonable doubt, says Scottish legal scholar John Grant, "the Crown
case is dead in the water."

At the time of the indictment,
a US State Department fact sheet pointed to a baggage list found at the Frankfurt
airport in 1989, which appeared to show that at a suitcase unloaded from the Air
Malta flight was in the baggage system at the time workers were loading baggage
on Pan Am 103A. The State Department report said the records "show that an
unaccompanied bag was routed from Air Malta Flight 180 ... to Frankfurt, where
it was loaded onto the Pan Am 103 feeder flight to London."

But behind the scenes,
that assertion was disputed by investigators themselves. An internal FBI memo
from October of 1989 said it's "misleading" to conclude from the Frankfurt
airport records that any bag, let alone one carrying a bomb, was transferred from
the Air Malta flight to the Pan Am plane. It said there's "no concrete indication"
of that.

In fact, Air Malta and
Maltese law enforcement officials say Air Malta Flight 180 did not carry any unaccompanied
luggage on the day that Pan Am 103 blew up. Maltese officials insist that all
55 bags checked onto the Flight 180 that day were claimed by passengers - and
that Scottish and American investigators found as much in their interviews with
passengers. The bags "tallied completely," says Maltese Police Commissioner
George Grech.

Malta's Minister of Home
Affairs, Tonio Borg, makes a more sweeping claim. "We have no proof that
these two Libyan suspects were involved in anything illegal in Malta regarding
this case, particularly the placing of this bomb on Air Malta Flight ... 180,"
Borg says.

A German court agreed.
A German investigating magistrate produced a report saying he could find no evidence
of a bag switch from the Air Malta plane to Pan Am 103A at Frankfurt on December
21, 1988. In 1992 the German government suspended prosecution of the Libyan defendants,
citing a lack of evidence.

The Clothing

The key physical evidence
purportedly linking the two defendants to the bomb is a scrap of clothing found
in Lockerbie. Forensic scientists determined the clothing fragment was part of
a pair of men's checked, brown trousers. That garment, they found, was packed
along with other clothes in the brown Samsonite that held the bomb. A fragment
of a tag showed the trousers had been purchased at Mary's House, a small shop
on a narrow street near the seaside in Sliema, Malta. We went to ask the proprietor
of Mary's House, Tony Gauci, who bought those trousers, but Gauci long ago grew
tired of reporters asking that question. He threw us out of his shop.

It's not surprising that
Gauci dreads the prospect of clarifying his past statements. He gave 19 statements
to Scottish police between September of 1989 and February, 1991. Those statements
are riddled with ambiguities and contradictions. Legal observers say it's unlikely
that Gauci will be of any help to the prosecution in the Netherlands.

The indictment says Gauci
implicated defendant Megrahi as the man who bought the clothing in the fall of
1988. But according to his police statements, Gauci's identification of the Libyan
defendant is ambiguous at best. Police showed Gauci a photo of Megrahi in February
of 1991. The Scottish police transcript quotes Gauci as saying:

"He would
perhaps have to look about 10 years or more older and he would look like the man
who bought the clothes. . . . I can only say that of all the photographs I have
been shown, this photograph. . . . is the only one really similar to the man who
bought the clothing, if he was a bit older . . . other than the one my brother
showed me."

That last remark, about
the photo shown to Gauci by his brother, is an apparent reference to another suspect
whom Gauci had previously described as resembling the shopper. Eleven months
before police showed Gauci the photo of Megrahi, Gauci volunteered for police
that his brother had shown him a newspaper photo of a Palestinian terrorist named
Mohammed Abu Talb. Talb had been convicted in the 1985 bombing of a Northwest
Airlines office in Copenhagen. In that earlier statement, according to the police
transcript, Gauci said:

"I think
the photograph in the newspaper may have been the man who bought the clothing.
He looks like him."

At the time, Talb was in
fact a leading suspect in the bombing of Pan Am 103. He had alleged ties to the
terror group first suspected in the Lockerbie bombing, the PFLP-GC. His accomplice
in the Copenhagen bombing was seen coming and going from a PFLP-GC safehouse in
Germany, according to West German police documents. Airport records showed that
Talb visited Malta in the fall of 1988. A raid of his apartment in Uppsala, Sweden
turned up an appointment book with the date, December 21, circled. At one point,
Lockerbie investigators had so much evidence against Mohammed Abu Talb they sought
to extradite him from Sweden.

"Was there compelling
reason to look at Abu Talb? Absolutely," says Vincent Cannistraro, who headed
the CIA's Lockerbie investigation at the time. "And we did do that. Did the
law enforcement folk on both sides of the ocean have enough compelling evidence
to go before a judge? I'm told they did, but I don't know the nature of that,
and I can't speak to it."

Talb refused requests for
an interview. He's serving a life sentence in Sweden for the Copenhagen bombing.
Lockerbie investigators cleared him of the Pan Am bombing for reasons US and British
officials say they can't discuss.

Besides his vague identification
of Megrahi as the man who bought clothes for the bomb suitcase, Tony Gauci gave
statements that directly contradict the prosecution's case. The Mary's House proprietor
told police he remembered the sale of the brown trousers because the man who bought
them also purchased an odd array of items, seemingly with little regard to their
size or desirability: a baby's sleeping garment; a tweed jacket that had languished
on the rack for five years. "It was as if anything I suggested he buy, he
would take it," Gauci is quoted as saying in a police statement.

Gauci could not remember
exactly when he'd made the sale to the strange-behaving Arab, but he told police
he did recall a couple of facts that could be helpful in pinpointing the date.
It was raining, Gauci recalled; that's why the customer bought an umbrella. Gauci
recalled that the Arab had come in just before his shop's 7 p.m. closing time,
and that he, Tony, was alone in the shop that evening; his brother, Paul, who
ordinarily worked evenings too, was home watching a soccer game on TV.

According to police transcripts,
Gauci's brother, Paul, told investigators that the most likely date of the purchase
was November 23, 1988, four weeks before the bombing of Pan Am 103. He recalled
staying home one evening to watch a soccer game between Rome and Dresden; a schedule
showed those two teams played on the evening of November 23. And Maltese weather
data confirms Tony Gauci's memory: rain fell that evening.

But the indictment of the
Libyans says defendant Megrahi bought the clothes at Mary's House not on November
23 but on December 7,1988. The problem: the Rome and Dresden soccer teams played
in the early afternoon, not in the evening, on December 7. And Malta did not get
a trace of rain that evening.

The Eyewitness

When asked about apparent
weaknesses in the evidence against the Libyans, former investigators have often
said: wait - there's an eyewitness.

His name is Abdul Jiacha,
and he worked at Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta along with his fellow Libyans,
the defendants, Megrahi and Fhimah. Former investigators say Jiacha saw one or
both of the defendants with a brown Samsonite suitcase at the Malta airport on
the morning of the Lockerbie bombing.

Jiacha starts with serious
credibility problems. He's been given protection and haven in the United States'
witness-protection program since 1992. British legal experts say courts in the
United Kingdom look with a skeptical eye on so-called "supergrasses,"
or informants who stand to gain financially or otherwise in return for their testimony.

But, credibility problems
aside, the prosecution's star witness has all but fallen flat, according to two
sources with access to the defense team's depositions. In a pre-trial statement
to defense lawyers, Jiacha could only say he saw a man, "possibly" the
defendant Megrahi, carrying a suitcase in the Malta airport "sometime in
December," 1988, the sources say.

Malta dis-Connection?

In total, the publicly-touted
evidence against the Libyans is profoundly flawed, say several respected legal
experts in Britain. British law bans public discussion of a pending criminal case.
But when top British attorney Michael Mansfield could speak freely, back in 1997,
he summarized the Malta evidence this way for BBC Scotland:

So far as the Maltese
connection is concerned, the clothing, the identification ... all of that, I think
add up to a situation in which were it to be presented to a court in the United
Kingdom, it probably wouldn't even get past the doors. It would be declared at
some point or another inadmissible ... because it is so fatally flawed at the
very root.

Pressed to respond to that
kind of characterization, former Lockerbie investigators retreat to broad assertions
that the evidence is in fact strong, despite appearances to the contrary.

"What I do know is
that the investigation finally led to conclude that that bomb was placed on an
Air Malta flight and fed into Pan Am 103 in Frankfurt," says former CIA official
Vincent Cannistraro.

"You asked my opinion
and my opinion is that the evidence is overwhelming and compelling, and. . .that
the Scottish judges will see it that way," says "Buck" Revell,
formerly head of the FBI's Lockerbie investigation.

Both officials suggest
there might be evidence against the Libyans that emerged after they left their
respective agencies and of which even they are not aware.

That's theoretically possible,
legal experts say. But some observers point to signs of desperation - of a prosecution
team grasping at the barest circumstantial evidence.

In late summer, 1999, Scottish
police gathered information at a hearing in Malta about a finding of Semtex plastic
explosive on the island in the mid-1980s. George Grech, now Malta's Police Commissioner,
was a district supervisor in 1985, when he found a quantity of Semtex buried alongside
a murder victim near a stone tower in northern Malta. The Semtex was wrapped in
an Arabic-language newspaper. Grech says Scottish investigators knew about the
find as early as 1989, when they were first examining the Malta Connection. Lockerbie
investigators showed little interest in the Semtex at the time, Grech says - and
appropriately, he adds, since in his view there is no evidence whatever linking
that found explosive to the Lockerbie bombing or the Libyan defendants.

Nonetheless, with the trial
approaching, Scottish police went back to Malta last summer and incorporated Grech's
discovery of Semtex as circumstantial evidence into the pre-trial indictment of
the Libyans. The new indictment refers to the defendants having high performance
plastic explosives in their possession between 1 January 1985 and 21 December
1988 "in an area of ground near Ghallis Tower, Malta," the area where
Grech found the explosives in 1985.

The generally self-contained
Grech gets animated when expressing his puzzlement that prosecutors would try
to link that Semtex to the destruction of Pan Am 103.

"I myself argued this
question with them," Grech says. "Don't tell me somebody had already
conceived to down an American airplane in 1985 already!"

A senior legal expert in
Scotland who has followed the Lockerbie case closely is sharply critical of the
investigation itself. "This case has been handled very badly, and certainly
not in accordance with expected standards," said the source, who spoke on
the condition he not be named because of Britain's ban on public comment of a
pending criminal case. "It's normal to investigate first and then indict.
In this case, they have come to a conclusion and then investigated only events
which fit their conclusion."

The Political Context

British and US officials
say the Lockerbie investigation has been steered by just one thing: the evidence.

But some relatives of those
killed on Pan Am 103 and expert observers have speculated that Middle East politics
played a role in that decision, too. The early suspects, members of the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), had close ties
to Syrian intelligence agencies. "Having the PFLP-GC under the microscope
also meant having the Syrian government under the microscope," says former
CIA counter-terrorism chief Cannistraro.

But while investigating
the PFLP-GC, the West was actively courting the man who gave that group haven,
Syrian President Haffez Assad, for his help in the Middle East peace process.
Then, in August, 1990, a new crisis erupted - the Gulf War - giving the administration
yet another reason to do business with Damascus.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait,
the Bush Administration rallied an international coalition to confront Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein. Syria joined the alliance and sent troops for Operation Desert
Storm - a step of crucial symbolic importance in building support for the alliance
among Arab countries, analysts say. Secretary of State James Baker rewarded Assad
by visiting him in Damascus in the fall of 1990. Critics suggested the visit sent
the wrong message on terrorism. Baker bristled: "We are not embracing Syria
and everything that Syria has done with which we disagree."

Nonetheless, when the Bush
Administration cleared the Syria-based terrorists in the Lockerbie bombing a year
later, some relatives of Pan Am 103 victims wondered out loud if a deal had been
done. That suspicion was heightened by the release, four days after the indictments,
of prominent Western hostages Terry Waite and Thomas Sutherland, who'd been held
in Beirut by Hizbollah terrorists under the control of the Syrian government.

Jim Swire, whose daughter
died on Pan Am 103, says it was plainly in the interests of the British and American
governments to absolve Syria and accuse Libya instead.

"That doesn't mean
that Libya or Libyan citizens are guilty or not guilty," Swire says. "It
merely undermines my faith as an individual in what governments are telling me
because it is so extremely convenient for them."

"Certainly had the
evidence led to Syria at that time, it would have been extremely inconvenient
and very, very complicated in the US diplomacy," says Middle East expert
Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland. "So if evidence later came
that implicated Libya, that certainly would lead to a sense of relief that it
was not Syria."

Telhami says he assumes
that the turn in the Lockerbie investigation was made in good faith. Another expert
thinks otherwise.

Noel Koch, the former counter-terrorism
chief at the Pentagon, says his opinion about Lockerbie is based on a reading
of the evidence - he finds the case against the Libyans thoroughly unpersuasive
- and on his inside observations of the Reagan/Bush Administration's approach
to state-sponsored terrorism. In the 1980s, Koch sat on an anti-terrorism task
force headed by then-Vice President Bush. He was constantly frustrated, he says,
by what he describes as the administration's unwillingness to take firm action
against all Middle East nations that sponsored terrorism.

"Whenever you got
to the point where you needed to take some overt action to demonstrate you were
actually doing something about terrorism, Libya was the preferred target,"
Koch says, "simply because Colonel Qadhafi himself was viewed in the Islamic
world as an apostate, in the Arab world as a pariah. Nothing much was lost by
going after him. A great deal could be lost by going after Syria or Iran or Iraq
or other countries that had an involvement in terrorism and which were, in fact,
known by the United States to be involved in terrorism."

Koch says he's convinced
that, two years after he left the Pentagon, the administration of then-President
Bush repeated the pattern of scapegoating Libya in the case of Pan Am 103.

Former President Bush and
his Secretary of State James Baker both declined to be interviewed for this report.

Buck Revell, who oversaw
the Lockerbie investigation for the FBI until six months before the Libyans were
indicted, denies suggestions of political influence. "There was never any
indication from President Reagan or thereafter President Bush - any interjection
of any geopolitical concerns." Revell adds that if either president had tried
to influence the investigation, "We would have had to end up with a special
prosecutor."

A Provocative, Persistent
Claim: US Covert Operations on Pan Am 103?

Pre-trial hearings have
made it clear that lawyers for the Libyan defendants are prepared not only to
assert their clients' innocence, but to suggest an alternate version of events:
that the Iranian government and the Syria-based terrorists, the PFLP-GC, conspired
and carried out the bombing. There are also signs that an even more provocative
claim will get resurrected in the courtroom: that covert US government drug operations
may have provided the bombers an opening to blow up Pan Am 103.

In the early 1990's, Time
magazine and TV networks on both sides of the Atlantic produced major stories
exploring that claim. Their most important source: a private investigator who'd
been hired by Pan Am to investigate who blew up Flight 103 and how they did it.
The investigator, Juval Aviv, emerged from his investigation with a remarkable
claim: that members of the PFLP-GC took advantage of a controlled drug-smuggling
route involving US agents to slip the bomb on the Pan Am jet. Government officials
vehemently denied the assertion, and still do.

In response to Aviv's report,
Pan Am filed subpoenas with several US intelligence and law enforcement agencies,
seeking documents to confirm or refute the private investigator's findings. The
government refused to release the documents on grounds of national security.

Some government officials
attacked Aviv's credibility, calling him a fabricator who had lied about his background.
The specifics of that accusation against Aviv don't appear to stand up to scrutiny.

Appearing on Britain's Channel Four in 1994, former FBI Director of Investigations
"Buck" Revell was asked if US agents ran operations in cooperation with
Middle East drug dealers around the time of the Pan Am attack. "There was
intelligence being gathered," Revell replied. "DEA [Drug Enforcement
Administration] assets were tasked by orders from the National Security Council
to try to develop intelligence information on the American hostages in Lebanon.
They were not used in conjunction with Pan Am 103. That entire operation had been
closed down."

But it appears defense lawyers
at the Lockerbie trial may try to prove otherwise  that some kind of DEA
operation was in fact underway in late December, 1988.

Two men who were high-ranking
security managers with Pan Am at the time told us they've given statements to
the defense team claiming that they were told of a US government drug operation
on their airline, through Frankfurt, at the time Pan Am 103 was destroyed.

Jim Berwick was the London-based
Manager of Corporate Security for Pan Am in 1988. He says at a quarterly meeting
a couple of months before the bombing of Pan Am 103, Phillip Connolly approached
him during a break. Connolly was one of the highest-ranking investigators in British
Customs and a 20-year acquaintance of Berwick's.

"And it was at that
time that [Connolly] gave me the indication that he had been the British Customs
representative at a meeting in Germany, where there were representatives of German
Customs and also DEA, and where it became known to Phil that Pan Am in actual
fact was being used as a conduit or a route on which drug shipments were being
allowed from Europe to the U-S."

Jones says Connolly then
phoned a few days after Pan Am 103 blew up and asked if Jones had considered the
possibility that 'the bag' had been switched at the Frankfurt airport.

"And I took that to
mean  it was a gentle hint  that, had we thought about a substitution
of the controlled drugs bag," Jones says.

The man whom Jones says
made that call, Phillip Connolly, is now retired from British Customs. We couldn't
reach him for comment. A source close to lawyers for the Libyans says Connolly
has given a deposition and may be called as a witness at the trial.

Spokespersons for British
Customs in London declined to comment on the claims by Berwick and Jones. A US
Justice Department spokesman said the department would not respond to questions
about drugs on Pan Am 103.

"If there was...even
a smell of government involvement in [the bombing of] Pan Am 103, I'd be the first
one up snitching on the government," says Michael Hurley, who was the DEA's
top official in Cyprus in 1988. Even if government agents were running a controlled
drug route from the Middle East through the Frankfurt airport, he says, that would
not create an opportunity for terrorists. "When you do a controlled delivery,
you have control of the drugs from the point of origin to the destination,"
Hurley says.

Support for the drug claims,
however, comes from one more surprising direction. A senior source responsible
for overseeing the Lockerbie investigation for the German government told us that
if we wanted to get closer to the truth about Lockerbie, we should "go back
and look at the drugs." The source spoke on the condition that he not be
named. The remark is striking given that the German government, according to the
claims by Aviv and others, cooperated with US and British agents in the controlled
drug operation through Frankfurt. So the Germans would share in any embarrassment
if it were discovered that such an operation helped to facilitate the bombing
of Pan Am 103.

Conclusion: Elusive Justice?

"It's quite difficult
to come back and picture what it was like," says Bill Parr, his gentle voice
barely audible above the soft rumble of his Land Rover. "You allow your mind
to ... shade out the horrors."

Parr is a long-time resident
of Lockerbie, a horse-lover and chemist for the local government. He's also a
volunteer search-and-rescue worker. So he and his dog spent the night of December
21, 1988, finding and marking dozens of the 259 bodies that fell from the sky.
On a driving tour of the places he went that night, he looks out the window at
the rolling green of a municipal golf course on the edge of Lockerbie. His voice
falters and his eyes fill up. "I hadn't realized. I thought I'd managed to
put a lot of it behind. But it's all these hills at the back here. This is where
the large number of bodies were found."

Parr says he's haunted
by images of those bodies - some gruesome, some poignant. He recalls finding the
bodies of two young women sitting in a field, completely intact, still strapped
to their seats. Their arms were wrapped tightly around one another, their fingers
crossed. It's one of the hardest things to face, Parr says: the implication that
those two young women were conscious during their long fall to earth.

Parr says that night planted
a seed of anger that flourishes inside him to this day. "There were a lot
of us, and I wasn't alone, but I'll stand there and I'll say it: If somebody had
said, 'Here's a gun, these are definitely the people who did it,' I would have
pulled the trigger, even though I know it [would be] wrong," Parr says. "Looking
back now, I think that would have been too good for them."

Parr admits his anger,
though deep and lasting, is only that of an unlucky volunteer forced to confront
the mayhem. The young women whose bodies he found were strangers to him. They
were someone else's daughters.

Jane and Jim Swire, whose
daughter Flora died over Lockerbie, say they yearn to see someone punished - but
it must be the right people.

"Whatever [the Libyan
defendants] are accused of, however horrendous their deeds are alleged to have
been, they are entitled to a presumption of innocence, unless and until they're
found guilty," Jim Swire says.

The Swires spend their
summers on Scotland's Isle of Skye, a couple of hundred miles from Lockerbie.
The family's vacation home overlooks windswept coastland dotted with sheep, highland
cattle, and crofts - small stone houses painted white. Flora Swire loved Skye,
says her mother, Jane. "Whenever I see the sea sparkling and the mountains
purple and the sky shot with tangerine and blue, I think, Flora should be seeing
this. She should be here to enjoy this, with her family. And I know she
never can. And that just highlights the cruelty and the sadness."

If Abdelbaset Megrahi and
Al-Amin Fhimah killed Flora and 269 other people, the Swires say, they hope that
will become clear at the trial. But Jim Swire says his grief is made worse by
a suspicion that the main culprits behind the bombing got away.

"Overwhelmingly, the
one thing that matters and keeps coming to the surface is our loss and more importantly
Flora's loss. She lost the rest of her life, we've lost her lovely company for
the rest of our lives. But, yes, the failure to get to the root of it has kept
my anger burning."

The Lockerbie bombing has
been called the world's biggest unsolved murder. Some who lost loved ones on Pan
Am 103 say they're afraid that won't change - no matter what the verdict in the
Netherlands.